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Europe’s Leading Public-Private Partnership for Cloud

The Helix Nebula Initiative is a partnership between industry, space and science to establish a dynamic ecosystem, benefiting from open cloud services for the seamless integration of science into a business environment. Today, the partnership counts over 40 public and private partners.

Deliverables

This document highlights the results achieved by the Helix Nebula consortium in the last two years, in retrospect against the initial goals outlined in the strategy published in 2011. It also considers the policy developments in Europe - including the key actions targeted by the European Cloud Computing Strategy in alignment with the long term objectives of the Digital Agenda for Europe - to identify areas requiring further effort and focus in the next three years.

This document summarizes the main outcomes and the agreed roadmap resulting from the two-year Helix Nebula (HN) project contextualized with the objectives set in the “Strategic Plan for a Scientific Cloud Computing Infrastructure for Europe” published in 2011, which laid the ground for the Helix Nebula Initiative and the related EU coordination and support action.

This document provides a source of information and support for decision-making regarding the potential governance model for the Helix Nebula Initiative. It shows how the European Science Cloud could be managed and supported, once the business models are chosen and implemented.

This document provides a summary of the work achieved during the second year of the Helix Nebula pilot-phase project in the area of interoperability between commercial cloud providers and publicly funded infrastructures.
The work package delivered:

During May and September 2014 the Flagship Application Deployment activity was undertaken as part of the Helix Nebula initiative and was coordinated as part of the FP7 project activity.

During the deployments, the Flagship applications of CERN, ESA and EMBL were deployed on to the two Blue Box platforms created for the purposes of the initiative, one was open source solution (SlipStream) and the other a commercial solution (EnStratius).

Throughout the Helix Nebula initiative a number of activities have taken place to identify the requirements of the users for a brokerage platform that would meet their particular flagship application needs. Initially these requirements were formulated by the Technical Architecture Committee as a series of User Stories that were created together with the existing user communities of the initiative.

INFOaaS is subject to network effects as its value increases for each user as the number of users grows. The more data providers share data, the more complete the services will become. INFOaaS is a multisided platform ecosystem. This kind of ecosystems faces the lifecy-cle challenge of (1) fast implementation, (2) adoption, (3) scaling, and (4) competition. Those steps are applied to INFOaaS to provide a roadmap for lifecycle management.

This deliverable specifically aims to compare the TCO of current on premise deployments at CERN with potentially outsourced on demand instances offered by the participating suppliers. Originally, the use cases of the flagships were supposed to be taken as reference to perform this exercise. Because of divergent specifications compared to the HN Market Place, which was set up in January 2014, it would not have been very beneficial. Therefore, we reached out for alternatives and identified CERN, an initial member of HN, as reference case.

This document provides a synthesis and analysis of business models for the further development of the Helix Nebula initiative resulting in seven potential business models with and without specific broker roles. Overarching and specific broker roles are required to manage the Helix Nebula ecosystem more effectively as bilateral communications cause higher risks and costs. The description of the roles and the business models follow a defined qualitative framework incorporating amongst others abstract costs, margins and risk assessment criteria.

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HELIX NEBULA PARTNERSHIP

Helix Nebula is a new, pioneering partnership between leading IT providers and four of Europe’s biggest research centres, CERN, EMBL, ESA and PIC, charting a course towards sustainable cloud services for the research communities - the Science Cloud.

Atos SE (Societas europaea) is an international information technology services company with annual 2013 revenue of EUR...